The Understanding, Reaching and Engaging Families Conference will take place in London on 18 September 2019. It will consider the reasons behind a lack of engagement from families and how this can be applied to improve outcomes for children, young people and parents. Behavioural science will be explored to help inform parental engagement and the use of family panels, discussion, workshops and presentations will deepen knowledge on the subject.

Delegates will be able to take part in a range of interactive workshops. Three workshops will take place in the morning and four in the afternoon, of which delegates can choose one in each session.

Morning workshops:

Photovoice: dads, photography and family learning – will share findings from an Irish visual research study which used Photovoice with fathers who moved from work to caring for their children during the recession

Family voices: using panels to understand your community – the Museum of London will explore how they have benefited from understanding families by setting up a panel that has allowed them to engage with new partners, the local community and how these have initiated new programmes

Engaging disengaged families: the Redbridge Institute STEM programme – will discuss how TES award winners Redbridge increased the number of learners from minority backgrounds on STEM programmes and deliver a science and technology activity

Afternoon workshops:

Nudging families into learning – will cover principles of behavioural science and how they can be applied to assist parents in supporting children to learn. It will incorporate BIT’s behavioural change model EAST.

Creating positive family attitudes towards maths – will use fun and creative approaches to maths activities to encourage families to engage with maths

How to recruit families for FL courses and keep them coming back for more! – will explore practical approaches to motivate and engage families to encourage a love of learning that has the power to change lives

Welcoming refugee and migrant families through learning – will share resources that deliver empowering and participatory approaches to engage migrant and refugee families and enable parents to support their child’s learning.

To consider behavioural science and how it can be applied to better understand what stops families form engaging with learning and how this can be applied to improve outcomes for parents and their children.